Ethnography: what is ethnography? (part 2)

PART 1

PART 2

Another “quaint” convention in traditional ethnography was to write in the present tense: creating an “ethnographic present” no matter how long ago the fieldwork took place.

“Tense” is difficult to understand for students, since it’s indicated through contextual marking in both Malay and Chinese, rather than through inflecting verbs. But as you know, we need to indicate when something happenedin the past, is happening now, or will happen in the future. Without tense, we don’t know when something happened. In ethnography, it’s important to be precise; for example, when you’re talking to the same person at different points in time, and their answers change. If we don’t indicate such differences, we have no sense of time passing, people changing their minds about things, life moving on.

In fact, this is a perennial problem for me in the field, because Batek grammar works like Malay in this respect. You’ll be listening to a story, think that it’s about something that’s going on, then find out that it’s really an old cultural memory from years past. The future is marked by the same suffix, -m, used to indicate desire (“I want” = “I will”), so I’m sure I’ve mis-interpreted a lot of cultural detail. But timelessness is exactly the impression you get when you read older ethnographies, where everything is written in the present tense. The past and the present of the fieldwork were compressed into a single ethnographic moment: the moment of doing fieldwork... and of reading the book. The people and their ways of life never changed; they were alwaysas written about in the ethnography. The reasons why anthropologists used the ethnographic present are complex, but related to the struggle for scientific authority. All you need to know is that ethnographies nowadays use tenses and voices as appropriate: present, past, I, they, we, etc.

The illusion of timelessness

Another important issue is deciding content: what goes into an ethnography? In what way can we evaluate its completeness? For the beginner, what do we write about, what to photograph? “What is ethnographic?” The practical answer is: depends on the research problem (more in the next lecture). You write about that. Much of what we know comes from our predecessors: reading widely and deeply, you get a sense of what counts as ethnography, which ones are good or bad, irritating, absorbing, etc. Subjective impressions. Overall anthropological knowledge. Good fieldwork leads to good ethnography. The better the fieldwork, the deeper the knowledge.

For most anthropologists I know, the real problem is selectivity. When we evaluate an ethnography, to some extent we also evaluate whether the ethnographer made the right choices. And we look at whether the whole book hangs together as a convincing cultural account. Even in the early days of anthropology, there were examples of “rebellious” anthropologists, and you can read about them in Nader’s (2011) historical account. There are many experiments in writing ethnography now, that try to deal with the challenges of interpretation and representation.

As you read ethnographies, you’ll see that newer ones read quite differently from older ones. In many ways they are easier to read. (but, then, your reading materials are filtered through my own tastes) They also have the ethnographer and/or the field situation featuring more prominently in the text.

One strategy I’ve used since I was a student is to include excerpts from my fieldnotes. As data for analysis, for atmosphere, or to give examples. Anthropologists might also include transcripts of conversations (in addition to short quotations) or diary accounts. You’ll have noticed that Conklin (1964) includes an account of a full day in the field, which tells you (convincingly) what kind of a fieldworker he was: up at 6am, and not asleep yet at midnight, and the entire day seemingly packed with activities! (of course, it was a selected day in the field...) When done well, experimental strategies can be rewarding and make the ethnography more convincing. Such as:

If someone gave you an ox, now, today, would you keep it?

I would keep it.

Now perhaps you have the ox right now. The person has already given you the ox. Now it is yours. Now after some weeks someone comes to you and says: Sir, I want to buy your ox. I will give you M2oo. I want that ox. Now what will you do?Yes ... he wants to buy it?

Yes.

And it is mine?

Yes. It is your ox, and then someone says: I want to buy it. Do you want to sell it? What will you say?

No. No, I will not sell it to him.

Why not? I will be already in possession of the ox. Now it is true that I should only go for money, that I should abandon the ox and go for money. Only in some other way, not by the method of selling the ox.....

Here is revealed the barrier between livestock and cash, the social rule that restricts selling, clearly exposed for the first time. . . It is clear, then, that the fundamental fact here is not that livestock are very useful economic investments (though they certainly are for many people) or that they are greatly loved and valued for their symbolic connotations (though this, too, is often the case) but that livestock and cash are not freely interconvertible. (Ferguson 1990:145–146)

This is in the best tradition of ethnographic practice. The conversational excerpts do light up what is otherwise a rather dry subject: the politics of development in Lesotho. The anthropologist could have articulated the “social rule” without the accompanying transcripts (and he did, when he wrote up the material as journal articles) but it’s more convincing when you “hear” the people talking and thinking through the hypothetical scenarios he gives them. You also get here a good sense for how ethnographic practice is different from those of policy-makers and development agents: the ethnographer asks the people what they would do under different situations, and links their answers to cultural ideas of property, as opposed to telling them what is good for them from a neoliberal economistic perspective.

Anthropologists can become quite polarised in debating how culture should be represented in ethnography. We don’t need to go into those debates for now, so I’ll offer my own opinions to start you thinking.

Ethnographies are the result of careful study, of the people, and with the people. Levi-Strauss, mentioned earlier, lists what ethnographers need: “skill, precision, a sympathetic approach, and objectivity” (1963:17). The one jarring note here is objectivity. As long as ethnography is based on fieldwork, and fieldwork is based on in-depth involvement in the lives of the people, the anthropologist is “part of the situation studied” (Powdermaker 1966:14). If you are part of what you are studying, then how can you be truly objective? Powdermaker has a good solution to this problem: “It is impossible to be totally objective toward one’s self as toward the people one studies. Within these limitations, I have tried to be as accurate as possible” (15). I’m not sure, myself, whether objectivity is a valid goal. I want to participate and make friends, to relate to people as equals and get to know them on their own terms. To be “objective” seems to deny all those rich field experiences and write a socially sterile account. I prefer Powdermaker’s approach: aim for honesty and accuracy.

Conversations in the field are subject to a lot of interpretation / analysis. What is she saying? Do I understand correctly? What does she mean? Is she saying what she really thinks, or what she wants me to think she thinks? How come this is different from what he said last week? How does any of this relate to the quarrel I witnessed last month? You should try to figure things out by having more conversations, doing more things with the people, observing more situations. And asking more questions. Hopefully you reach a point where somebody tells you that you’re being stupid, which can be as rewarding as being told that you’ve understood. Having gained knowledge through this collaborative process of mutual interpretation, you then must write it up. Personally, I like ethnographies that reflect this process of coming-to-know. Not in an extreme way, but just about enough to enrich the cultural account. That demonstrate not only “observation” but “participation” as well.

Like all written accounts, ethnographies have a beginning, a middle, and an end. How the material is organised is up to the ethnographer but it should relate in some way to the objectives of the ethnography and the theoretical orientation of the writer. If the ethnography is directed towards students (classroom texts), usually it covers basic topics like environment, kinship, social organisation, livelihoods, religion, political system, etc. If the goals are more modest (less “whole” in their scope), they may present a synopsis of the culture / society followed by in-depth exploration of the topic. It also depends on whether somebody else has done research on, and written about, that group. Then you can more confidently write about “what is not known”: ideally, your own specialist area.

For now, one final criteria: ethnographies should be readable (less dense with esoteric text) and accessible to the widest possible audience. This means written in straightforward language that even an 18-year-old can understand. Good ethnographies are also attentive to the needs of readers. Many ethnographies are not: they are boring, full of difficult words and long sentences, and/or try to show how clever the ethnographer is. “For the lay person, such as myself, . . .ethnographic writing tends to be surprisingly boring. How, one asks constantly, could such interesting people doing such interesting things produce such dull books? What did they have to do to themselves?” (Pratt 1986:33). This seems to me to run against the broader goal of ethnographic writing: to communicate difficult ideas, so that they may inspire other people to learn more. How you learn to write ethnography is a lifelong process. It will reflect your own growth and maturity, and tastes. My own models of ethnographic writing are generally not other anthropologists, but writers of fiction and essayists.

Summarising: ethnographies are sociocultural accounts that appear as words or images. They are based on anthropological fieldwork, and as texts have a lot of conventions embedded in the way they are written. They are interpretations of culture and society, and ideally result from collaborative activities between anthropologists and locals in the field.

They are also theoretical, in two broad ways. Anthropologists usually don’t do fieldwork without a theoretical framework in mind, out of which they develop concrete research problems and questions. In other words, the questions we ask in the field are not plucked out of thin air, but have been designed to respond to theoretical debates. (In my “other life” as an applied anthropologist, I do what I’m told, but the approaches I take are based on my theories of what needs to be known.) Anthropologists know that your starting questions need to be flexible, and you may change your research approach altogether in response to field conditions, but there will still be an underlying theory of behaviour or meaning guiding your research.

The organisation of the material to one extent or another both responds to theory and reflects theory. If you look at Conklin’s article again, there’s no explicit theory stated anywhere in that chapter. But reading it I can see evidence of theories of child socialisation popular at that time, for example by taking the life cycle approach. Conklin, I suspect, also had an unexpressed theory of agency. The child is front and centre of the account: she charms the ethnographer with her “astonishing maturity of interests and experience” (107), she tells him what he needs to know (in my experience, children are great “spies” for anthropologists, clueing us in to what’s going on and what are key questions), she interprets symbolic behaviours for him, she learns to read and write the local Hanunōo script on her own initiative and by herself. The portrait is not of a child “being socialised” (where society “descends” on her and she passively acts out her established roles) but one who draws on her “astonishing” cultural knowledge to make choices and decisions, albeit within the established social conventions of that mountain village. The article is simply written, but has layers of meaning.

Theory in ethnography could also be a theory of writing ethnography. For example, everything I’ve presented as “my opinion” reflects my theories of what ethnography should be. But on this point, more in later lectures.

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Conklin, Harold C. 1964. Maling, a Hanunóo girl from the Philippines. In In the company of man: Twenty portraits of anthropological informants, edited by Joseph B. Casagrande. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Ferguson, James. 1990. The anti-politics machine: development, depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural anthropology. Translated from the French by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.

Nader, Laura. 2011. Ethnography as theory. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1 (1):211–219.

Powdermaker, Hortense. 1966. Stranger and friend: the way of an anthropologist. New York: Norton.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1986. Fieldwork in common places. In Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press.